As we know, social problem is intricate so that in most circumstances we cannot accurately predict what will happen in human society if something changes or goes wrong. Many sociologists thought that we cannot unravel the mystery of social phenomena by the same way of explaining the physical world, because there is a great difference between people and a physical atom. In comparison with a physical atom, individual person has his/her own unique and elaborate personality, background, and experiences. Thus, it is difficult to understand how individual makes a decision in various situations, let alone to predict the collective behaviors in daily life of human beings. Nevertheless, the book The Social Atom seeks to persuade us that the social phenomena may not be as complicated as we thought before, if we study the pattern of self-organization as physics but not individual complexity. The author, Mark Buchanan, of this book is a physicist and science writer, and he was formerly the editor of Nature which is a scientifically acclaimed international journal of science. However, the book The Social Atom is sort of a popular science book, which is written in an easy to read non-academic style and assumes no prior knowledge of either physics or social science.
In the beginning of the book, Buchanan said that when people think about physics, they think about quantum theory, Newton’s three laws of motion, Albert Einstein and his theory of relativity, black holes and so on. However, physics has moved a way beyond that. Modern physics has also branched out into another topic of interest. Not only did physicists concern with the fundamental equations, but they were keen to know how organization can emerge by itself. For example, they studied why the same water molecules can turn to solid when they are put into the freezer, and why they can change into vapor when boiled. Another question physicist was inquisitive to understand is why the same carbon atoms make up both diamond and graphite. In short, the answer of above questions is that a new and totally different material can emerge just by putting the same atoms together in a different pattern. In other words, the vital key for us to understand is the pattern of self-organization but not atoms themselves. From the same point of view, Buchanan claims that social science is like physics, pattern matters more than individual. And the complex social outcomes can result from potentially simple rules of individual behavior. That means we can explain and even predict a wide variety of human behaviors by using the observations akin to physics. What is more, he creates a new term called “Social Physics” for this approach.
Buchanan then gives far-reaching examples to show that regardless of people thinking of ourselves as self-determined individuals making up their own mind, they usually behave instinctively and act strongly rely on others around us. One of interesting example is that when you observe carefully the crowd on the street, either those who are shopping or just flooding out of a stadium after a big baseball game, you may find some intangible structure of the crowd. In the first place, everyone goes in different directions so that the crowd movements look like somewhat chaotic. In the meantime, some people begin to follow another in an effort to avoid collisions, and they gradually form narrow streams of movement. In the streams everyone moves in the same direction and flows along with one another. Furthermore, as more people join such streams, there is a greater pull on others to join the flow. This kind of herding behavior is not intended or planned by anyone, but the emerging pattern, the pedestrian stream, is somehow improvisatory and self-organizing. The motivation of the individual is simple, following with others in order to readily avoid colliding with the rest of the crowd, but the outcome is a complex collective behavior pattern. The idea is that we human being, just as social atoms, work by simple rules in the most daily life situations. If we learn more similar patterns in our social life at different levels, we will be able to anticipate social phenomena accurately.
Another compelling example given by Buchanan in the book is the well-known neighborhood segregation model in social science. In the US, spatial separation of the races is a long-standing phenomenon; white people and black people are often living in different communities. Most people think intuitively the cause is racism. But Thomas Schelling, awarded the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, showed us racial segregation could be just another collective pattern similar with the streams in a crowd but not related to racism. In 1971, Schelling designed a board game with dimes and pennies which stand for two races of people. At first he premises that no one is racist, but they are reasonably tolerant of diversity and only move when they find themselves in a clear minority group within their neighborhood. More specifically, they follow a rule like “If fewer than 30% of my neighbors belong to my race, then I will move.” The simulation game starts with a well-integrated community, and two races of people are mixed together randomly. In each run, every individual checks their surrounding and decides to move or stay by using the simple rule. After a short time, every individual stops moving and keeps a stable status. They surprisingly end up dividing themselves into sharply segregated group livings, even though the outcome is not intended by any individual. It is very counterintuitive and the link between individual attitudes and collective outcome is not straightforward. Buchanan said: “This is the power of pattern over people, and you can easily get an outcome that absolutely no one desires or intended… Next time you see racial segregation you can’t conclude that is racial discrimination.”
The work of Schelling unveils the fact that micro-motives lead to surprising macro-behavior, and enlighten many scientific fields. Recently, several physicists, computer scientists and social scientists have used computer simulation models to study patterns by regarding people as social atoms and endowing them with simple rules to interact with each other. The works include simulating human trails, traffic jams, panic behavior of pedestrians, riot situations, market crushes and bubbles, and social epidemics. They show that the thought with respect to our human society has been changing. Human behavior could be often simpler than what we think; to understand the human world better, we need to think of patterns, not just people. At any rate, if you would like to understand this new trend in social science, the book The Social Atom is definitely the best book for your reference.
Showing posts with label english-writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label english-writing. Show all posts
2010/01/23
Book Review: The Tipping Point
Did you ever wonder about how social epidemics – craze, fad, or word of mouth – get started? Why is that some ideas, behaviors, or produces burst out to epidemics while others don’t? And what can we do purposely to begin and incite positive epidemics of our own? These are the kinds of questions that Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, tries to answer in The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. The tipping point is the name given by epidemiology for the dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can totally change at once. The SARS (Sever Acute Respiratory Syndrome), for example, can have little or inconsiderable harm on human society for a long time without being an epidemic. But suddenly, once a threshold or a critical point is crossed in terms of the number of infected people, situation moves rapidly downward and gets much worse. Gladwell borrows the idea and maps it to similar patterns observed in numerous social and marketing phenomena. Moreover, he claims that the three rules of the essence – the Law of Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context – offer a way of making sense of epidemics and provide us the direction to reach the tipping point.
The Law of Few is roughly comparable to the famous Pareto Principle, also called 80/20 rule, which means a few influential people can disproportionately incite social and behavioral epidemics. These key people usually have remarkable social skills and social contacts to effectively disseminate their information or ideas; Gladwell groups them into three types of personalities: Connector, Maven, and Salesman.
Connectors are individuals who know and contact lots of various people, and establish large social networks. They collect people/acquaintances like other people collect stamps, and maintain the “weak ties” across different communities. Furthermore, their influential social capital bringing different people together make our world smaller, which is also why the impetus can be carried around every corner of the world.
Another group of individuals are kind of professional shoppers; Maven is the name Gladwell makes for them. Mavens love to gather information no matter what market is – computers, electronics, clothes, desserts – that is why they can always find out where the cheapest or best bargain products exactly are. Indeed, they know well about all the state-of-the-art stuffs and have one first forever. In addition, they enjoy sharing what they have found with friends, and at most time people also are inclined to look for advice from them.
While Connectors are social glue and Mavens are data banks, Salesmen are opinion makers who are charming, enthusiastic, and convincing. Although Salesmen may not have knowledge as much as Mavens, their innate charisma, verbal or non-verbal social skill can zap magically persuasive signals leading people to do what they do or agree with what they believe. Once in a while even neither Salesmen nor we are aware of this powerful influence, but we just unconsciously copy their style and want to be more like them.
The epidemics of idea usually start with Maven, because they are faithful first adopters of the new stuffs. Next, Connectors get information from Mavens or the friends of Mavens occasionally, and distribute the idea over different communities or countries. Finally once the spread idea gains enough approval of Salesmen, the snowball starts rolling! Sometimes the epidemic process can be more complex, because a single person can serve multiple or all three roles. Although these three key personalities contribute much effort to idea contagion, it may not be able to reach the tipping point to incite a total change if the idea is not sticky enough to be retained by new recipients.
Therefore, the second premise Gladwell made about tipping point is The Stickiness Factor which relates to the content of the message. It means that the message should grab the listener’s attention, get stuck in their mind and move them into action. He also illustrates that little changes in the presentation or package of idea can have large effect on stickiness by giving the example of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues.
The last ingredient of the social epidemics is The Power of Context. Gladwell first takes the well-known psychological study Prison Experiment, made by Stanford University in 1971, as an example to show how environment turns a good-natured college student into a crucial perpetrator. Then he presents the eminent Broken Window theory: “If a building with a few broken windows which are left unrepaired, passersby may consider that nobody cares about it and no one is in charge. Soon, a few more windows were damaged and finally the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street in front of it.” Finally he describes how New York City government based on the theory improved the subway environment by the crackdown on graffiti and fare-beating. And afterward it is dramatically yielding a big drop in crime rates of the whole New York City. The main idea which Gladwell wants to emphasize here is that epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places where they occur. Furthermore, a seemingly small detail may clue people how to behave.
The Tipping Point is a powerful and fascinating book that cuts across a variety of fields of interest ranging from marketing study cases to psychological and sociological experiments. Gladwell also provides far-reaching examples and compelling ideas within the book to support the three main principles he advocates: the Law of Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. Besides that, his excellent writing really makes it easier for readers to catch the points and be persuaded. A fly in the ointment I think of, however, is that the author cite a multitude of concepts and coalesce together to convince reader, but do not clarify rigorously the correlation between the three principles and the tipping point. Maybe the reason is that the social epidemics always start from a series of small events and influences, grow in an insensible way, and then lead to rapid change, but often stop quite sharply and frequently leaving no subsequent track of itself. For any sake, The Tipping Point undoubtedly gives a profound insight of the social epidemics and inspires me much.
The Law of Few is roughly comparable to the famous Pareto Principle, also called 80/20 rule, which means a few influential people can disproportionately incite social and behavioral epidemics. These key people usually have remarkable social skills and social contacts to effectively disseminate their information or ideas; Gladwell groups them into three types of personalities: Connector, Maven, and Salesman.
Connectors are individuals who know and contact lots of various people, and establish large social networks. They collect people/acquaintances like other people collect stamps, and maintain the “weak ties” across different communities. Furthermore, their influential social capital bringing different people together make our world smaller, which is also why the impetus can be carried around every corner of the world.
Another group of individuals are kind of professional shoppers; Maven is the name Gladwell makes for them. Mavens love to gather information no matter what market is – computers, electronics, clothes, desserts – that is why they can always find out where the cheapest or best bargain products exactly are. Indeed, they know well about all the state-of-the-art stuffs and have one first forever. In addition, they enjoy sharing what they have found with friends, and at most time people also are inclined to look for advice from them.
While Connectors are social glue and Mavens are data banks, Salesmen are opinion makers who are charming, enthusiastic, and convincing. Although Salesmen may not have knowledge as much as Mavens, their innate charisma, verbal or non-verbal social skill can zap magically persuasive signals leading people to do what they do or agree with what they believe. Once in a while even neither Salesmen nor we are aware of this powerful influence, but we just unconsciously copy their style and want to be more like them.
The epidemics of idea usually start with Maven, because they are faithful first adopters of the new stuffs. Next, Connectors get information from Mavens or the friends of Mavens occasionally, and distribute the idea over different communities or countries. Finally once the spread idea gains enough approval of Salesmen, the snowball starts rolling! Sometimes the epidemic process can be more complex, because a single person can serve multiple or all three roles. Although these three key personalities contribute much effort to idea contagion, it may not be able to reach the tipping point to incite a total change if the idea is not sticky enough to be retained by new recipients.
Therefore, the second premise Gladwell made about tipping point is The Stickiness Factor which relates to the content of the message. It means that the message should grab the listener’s attention, get stuck in their mind and move them into action. He also illustrates that little changes in the presentation or package of idea can have large effect on stickiness by giving the example of Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues.
The last ingredient of the social epidemics is The Power of Context. Gladwell first takes the well-known psychological study Prison Experiment, made by Stanford University in 1971, as an example to show how environment turns a good-natured college student into a crucial perpetrator. Then he presents the eminent Broken Window theory: “If a building with a few broken windows which are left unrepaired, passersby may consider that nobody cares about it and no one is in charge. Soon, a few more windows were damaged and finally the sense of anarchy will spread from the building to the street in front of it.” Finally he describes how New York City government based on the theory improved the subway environment by the crackdown on graffiti and fare-beating. And afterward it is dramatically yielding a big drop in crime rates of the whole New York City. The main idea which Gladwell wants to emphasize here is that epidemics are sensitive to the conditions and circumstances of the times and places where they occur. Furthermore, a seemingly small detail may clue people how to behave.
The Tipping Point is a powerful and fascinating book that cuts across a variety of fields of interest ranging from marketing study cases to psychological and sociological experiments. Gladwell also provides far-reaching examples and compelling ideas within the book to support the three main principles he advocates: the Law of Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. Besides that, his excellent writing really makes it easier for readers to catch the points and be persuaded. A fly in the ointment I think of, however, is that the author cite a multitude of concepts and coalesce together to convince reader, but do not clarify rigorously the correlation between the three principles and the tipping point. Maybe the reason is that the social epidemics always start from a series of small events and influences, grow in an insensible way, and then lead to rapid change, but often stop quite sharply and frequently leaving no subsequent track of itself. For any sake, The Tipping Point undoubtedly gives a profound insight of the social epidemics and inspires me much.
2009/11/30
The Story of Subprime Mortgage Crisis
In recent years, we always heard somebody talk about global recession, financial downturn or financial crisis from everywhere. We have also seen many people lose their jobs, and several banks or even a country, Iceland, go bankrupt. What happened to the world? How did it happen and why? A well-known quotation: “When America sneezes the world catches a cold,” always can describe the big picture of the global financial crisis in general, and there is no exception this time. The ongoing financial crisis, also known as the subprime mortgage crisis, was started by a dramatic rise in mortgage defaults and foreclosures in the United States. Many financial institutions, financial instruments and fiscal wizardries coalesce together to contribute to this whole crisis. Nevertheless, as we known, the complex phenomena can always be attributable to simple mechanisms and motivations. If we can grasp the information about who the major players are and what their strategies in the subprime mortgage game, the story of the financial crisis will not be complicated to understand but rather interesting. In fact, the whole process of this recent financial crisis can be divided into four stages.
The first stage can be dated back to September 11, 2001, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, set out to adjust the interest rate to historic low to keep economy strong. This policy made it easier for buyers to purchase a house, because they could pay less interest. Additionally, three kinds of participants could get benefits from it. They are the families which want to buy their own houses, the mortgage brokers and the lenders (banks). Most of families cannot afford to pay the full price for the house all at once, so they often save for down payment. If the family has good credit history and the proof of income, the broker will connect the family to the lender for helping them get their mortgage from lenders. During this stage, because of lower interest rate many families got the mortgage approvals and bought their own houses. The lender received the regular payments including principal and interest from house owners every year. Brokers also made nice commissions from connecting those house owners and lenders. Everything worked out nicely; the policy succeeded in growing the economy of the United States.
During second stage, from about 2002 to 2004, the lower interest rate not only attracted more families to buy houses, but also made the investment banks start searching for new avenues to improve their returns. The reason is that the lower the interest rates, the more money they could borrow to amplify the outcome of a deal. In finance, it is called leverage which is the major way that an investment bank makes money. The leverage, generally speaking, is borrowing money from somewhere to invest some financial instruments at a low price, selling out at a high price, paying off the debts and earning the large returns. In other words, the leverage allows people to make big profits with little capital. In 2001, a Chinese statistician, Xiang Lin Li, introduced an influential model which allowed for the rapid pricing of CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligation). The model made a CDO, a financial wizardry, which turns mortgages into securities in order to be sold in the global markets; therefore, it became a popular leveraged financial instrument for investment banks. From then on, both the lower interest rate and useful financial model made investment banks eager to borrow money to buy mortgages from lender banks, because they could package mortgages into CDOs and sell them out to global investors. Investors also love the CDO owing to the high returns and low risk. To sum up, during this stage CDOs made lenders offload risk, helping investment bankers to create a large leverage ratio, and offering a lucrative and safe returns for investors. Everything worked out perfectly. CDOs, just like alchemy, effectively pushed up economy growth, keeping house prices rising, and making every participant earn tremendous money.
The turning point occurred during stage three from 2004 to around 2006. The demand for mortgages and CDO s kept rising, while the families who were qualified for a mortgage to buy home became less and less. Thus, brokers and lenders started to expand their subprime lending program. Subprime lending is defined as extending credit to borrowers whose characteristics exhibit a significantly higher risk of default than traditional bank lending customers; in most cases, lenders avoided or restrained the subprime lending due to high risk. However, as economy and house prices kept growing by leaps and bounds, anyone who slowed down or fell behind would have been interpreted as a decline in their market share compared to others. At this moment, greed started to kick in, and a strong incentive for people to make more bets--speculating or gambling. That is why lenders and investment banks kept broadening the scope of the subprime mortgage lending, even though they knew those who with poor credit histories may bring about higher risk of default and resulting loan losses. Besides, they became over-confident as they all thought they had figured out how to take on risk and make money more effectively by CDOs. However, they just fooled themselves into thinking they were safe and high ground.
In order to mitigate the housing bubble, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of Federal Reserve, began raising interest rates in July 2004. Then a series of rate hiked from 1% to 5.25% within two years. In 2006, the beginning of the last stage, as Greenspan wished, the great housing bubble finally started to deflate; nevertheless, it was also the detonator of the subprime mortgage crisis. First of all, as interest rates rose, more and more subprime borrowers could not afford the high payment. Therefore, they stopped paying their mortgage and their houses were in foreclosures which increased the supply of houses for sales. On the other hand, the high interest rate reduced the demand of the house. A simultaneous decrease in demand and increase in supply unquestionably placed downward pressure on house prices. Accordingly, the house price was not rising anymore; it fell down instead. This created an interesting and critical problem for house owners who still paid the mortgage. As all the houses of their neighborhood went up for sell, the value of their house went down together. They wondered why they should pay back the mortgage when their houses are not worth that much. Thereupon, they also defaulted on their mortgages one after the other, and which made house prices escalate into a crash. Brokers, lenders and investment banks really suffered from this bad situation, because they held large number of worthless houses in foreclosure which no one wants to buy. At the same time, they had been borrowing millions or billions of money, but they failed to pay back their loans. Hence, they finally fell into a financial crisis in 2008. For example, Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest US investment bank, went bankrupt; Merrill Lynch, HBOS, Alliance & Leicester were taken out by other banks; Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are nationalized; Bear Stearns, RBS, Citibank, Freddie Mac and Bank of America received Federal bailout funds. On the other hand, the collapse of housing bubble also made CDOs become valueless; lots of investors watched their money burn up. Consequently, home owners forsook their houses; financial institutions lost most of their money and faced large debt problems; the confidence in market slumped; the whole financial system was frozen and dark.
As a matter of fact, we are still in the last stage of the crisis now, because the U.S. house price index signals a 30-35% potential drop in this coming year. That indicates that the world economic recession is not bottoming and the prospect of the world economy will not be bright in the short term. However, every cloud has a silver lining; most of the countries in the world have been pumping more money into their economy. There’s always hope and we will get through this.
The first stage can be dated back to September 11, 2001, the chairman of Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, set out to adjust the interest rate to historic low to keep economy strong. This policy made it easier for buyers to purchase a house, because they could pay less interest. Additionally, three kinds of participants could get benefits from it. They are the families which want to buy their own houses, the mortgage brokers and the lenders (banks). Most of families cannot afford to pay the full price for the house all at once, so they often save for down payment. If the family has good credit history and the proof of income, the broker will connect the family to the lender for helping them get their mortgage from lenders. During this stage, because of lower interest rate many families got the mortgage approvals and bought their own houses. The lender received the regular payments including principal and interest from house owners every year. Brokers also made nice commissions from connecting those house owners and lenders. Everything worked out nicely; the policy succeeded in growing the economy of the United States.
During second stage, from about 2002 to 2004, the lower interest rate not only attracted more families to buy houses, but also made the investment banks start searching for new avenues to improve their returns. The reason is that the lower the interest rates, the more money they could borrow to amplify the outcome of a deal. In finance, it is called leverage which is the major way that an investment bank makes money. The leverage, generally speaking, is borrowing money from somewhere to invest some financial instruments at a low price, selling out at a high price, paying off the debts and earning the large returns. In other words, the leverage allows people to make big profits with little capital. In 2001, a Chinese statistician, Xiang Lin Li, introduced an influential model which allowed for the rapid pricing of CDOs (Collateral Debt Obligation). The model made a CDO, a financial wizardry, which turns mortgages into securities in order to be sold in the global markets; therefore, it became a popular leveraged financial instrument for investment banks. From then on, both the lower interest rate and useful financial model made investment banks eager to borrow money to buy mortgages from lender banks, because they could package mortgages into CDOs and sell them out to global investors. Investors also love the CDO owing to the high returns and low risk. To sum up, during this stage CDOs made lenders offload risk, helping investment bankers to create a large leverage ratio, and offering a lucrative and safe returns for investors. Everything worked out perfectly. CDOs, just like alchemy, effectively pushed up economy growth, keeping house prices rising, and making every participant earn tremendous money.
The turning point occurred during stage three from 2004 to around 2006. The demand for mortgages and CDO s kept rising, while the families who were qualified for a mortgage to buy home became less and less. Thus, brokers and lenders started to expand their subprime lending program. Subprime lending is defined as extending credit to borrowers whose characteristics exhibit a significantly higher risk of default than traditional bank lending customers; in most cases, lenders avoided or restrained the subprime lending due to high risk. However, as economy and house prices kept growing by leaps and bounds, anyone who slowed down or fell behind would have been interpreted as a decline in their market share compared to others. At this moment, greed started to kick in, and a strong incentive for people to make more bets--speculating or gambling. That is why lenders and investment banks kept broadening the scope of the subprime mortgage lending, even though they knew those who with poor credit histories may bring about higher risk of default and resulting loan losses. Besides, they became over-confident as they all thought they had figured out how to take on risk and make money more effectively by CDOs. However, they just fooled themselves into thinking they were safe and high ground.
In order to mitigate the housing bubble, Alan Greenspan, the chairman of Federal Reserve, began raising interest rates in July 2004. Then a series of rate hiked from 1% to 5.25% within two years. In 2006, the beginning of the last stage, as Greenspan wished, the great housing bubble finally started to deflate; nevertheless, it was also the detonator of the subprime mortgage crisis. First of all, as interest rates rose, more and more subprime borrowers could not afford the high payment. Therefore, they stopped paying their mortgage and their houses were in foreclosures which increased the supply of houses for sales. On the other hand, the high interest rate reduced the demand of the house. A simultaneous decrease in demand and increase in supply unquestionably placed downward pressure on house prices. Accordingly, the house price was not rising anymore; it fell down instead. This created an interesting and critical problem for house owners who still paid the mortgage. As all the houses of their neighborhood went up for sell, the value of their house went down together. They wondered why they should pay back the mortgage when their houses are not worth that much. Thereupon, they also defaulted on their mortgages one after the other, and which made house prices escalate into a crash. Brokers, lenders and investment banks really suffered from this bad situation, because they held large number of worthless houses in foreclosure which no one wants to buy. At the same time, they had been borrowing millions or billions of money, but they failed to pay back their loans. Hence, they finally fell into a financial crisis in 2008. For example, Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest US investment bank, went bankrupt; Merrill Lynch, HBOS, Alliance & Leicester were taken out by other banks; Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are nationalized; Bear Stearns, RBS, Citibank, Freddie Mac and Bank of America received Federal bailout funds. On the other hand, the collapse of housing bubble also made CDOs become valueless; lots of investors watched their money burn up. Consequently, home owners forsook their houses; financial institutions lost most of their money and faced large debt problems; the confidence in market slumped; the whole financial system was frozen and dark.
As a matter of fact, we are still in the last stage of the crisis now, because the U.S. house price index signals a 30-35% potential drop in this coming year. That indicates that the world economic recession is not bottoming and the prospect of the world economy will not be bright in the short term. However, every cloud has a silver lining; most of the countries in the world have been pumping more money into their economy. There’s always hope and we will get through this.
2009/10/22
I love Swimming
I did know how to swim the breaststroke when I was a child. However, I never seriously practiced my swimming skill until this summer. I didn’t even get to any beach and swimming spool for two years. During this summer my gym membership expired, and it’s scorched hot this summer in Taiwan. So I changed my exercise program and made up my mind to improve my swimming technique.
First of all, I tried to get back the familiarity of the breaststroke, because I had almost forgotten how to breathe in swimming. In the beginning few days of my swimming practice, it was really difficult for me to swim 500m. I felt a bit frustrated since even those middle-aged women could swim better than me. However, I didn’t give up in the initial stage. Because it was really hot outside and there were many slander and hot chicks in the swimming pool during the summer. Swimming pool was doubtless the best place to stay during the summer I thought of. Therefore, I went to swim about two hours a day and three or four days per week. Having been keeping practicing over and over again for around a month or so, I could swim two kilometers at the beginning of August. Although I deemed that is a big breakthrough of my swimming skill, I hoped I can acquire more techniques in this summer.
Freestyle stroke is another style of swim and is also renowned as the fastest technique. I thought that is why I been overtaken by those who swam the freestyle stroke so often. Thus, I made a decision to learn the technique before the end of the summer, even though no people taught me how to do that. At first, I found out some good video tutorials like below ones.
After that, I learned from those video step by step how to swim the freestyle stroke such as kicking, pulling and breathing while swimming. Nevertheless, learning the technique was a bit tougher than I thought it would be and it almost took me a month to smoothly swim 50m without exhausting my strength. At any rate, I have been getting hang of some tricks of the freestyle stroke in recent days and feel free and relaxed to swim 1.5 kilometers by using the freestyle stroke up to now.
Although the summer almost gone in Taiwan, I think my swimming skill has already progressed leaps and bounce, and swimming is undoubtedly becoming to one of my favorite sports and leisure activities. It’s fantastic, isn’t it.
First of all, I tried to get back the familiarity of the breaststroke, because I had almost forgotten how to breathe in swimming. In the beginning few days of my swimming practice, it was really difficult for me to swim 500m. I felt a bit frustrated since even those middle-aged women could swim better than me. However, I didn’t give up in the initial stage. Because it was really hot outside and there were many slander and hot chicks in the swimming pool during the summer. Swimming pool was doubtless the best place to stay during the summer I thought of. Therefore, I went to swim about two hours a day and three or four days per week. Having been keeping practicing over and over again for around a month or so, I could swim two kilometers at the beginning of August. Although I deemed that is a big breakthrough of my swimming skill, I hoped I can acquire more techniques in this summer.
Freestyle stroke is another style of swim and is also renowned as the fastest technique. I thought that is why I been overtaken by those who swam the freestyle stroke so often. Thus, I made a decision to learn the technique before the end of the summer, even though no people taught me how to do that. At first, I found out some good video tutorials like below ones.
After that, I learned from those video step by step how to swim the freestyle stroke such as kicking, pulling and breathing while swimming. Nevertheless, learning the technique was a bit tougher than I thought it would be and it almost took me a month to smoothly swim 50m without exhausting my strength. At any rate, I have been getting hang of some tricks of the freestyle stroke in recent days and feel free and relaxed to swim 1.5 kilometers by using the freestyle stroke up to now.
Although the summer almost gone in Taiwan, I think my swimming skill has already progressed leaps and bounce, and swimming is undoubtedly becoming to one of my favorite sports and leisure activities. It’s fantastic, isn’t it.
2009/05/13
Embarrassing Experiences
In my childhood and youth, I was a naughty boy who liked to try anything exciting or adventurous. During those years, either playing in the house or neighborhood, I truly had plenty of fun and got many precious memories. Nevertheless, as most of the people, several things I have done then were really embarrassing and made me blush. Sometime I still feel shamefaced while recalling those embarrassing moments, even if they have passed for a long time. And once in a while, I just can’t believe how I could have been so intoxicated with those stupid things. To me, however, some of them are definitely my unforgettable memories.
One of my unforgettable embarrassing experiences happened in an afternoon when no adults were at home; my father work outside and my mom went to play mahjong with neighbors. I orchestrated a stupid adventure and led to some troubles in the end. To begin with, three children, I, Bruce and Sandy, my young brother and sister, stayed at home doing homework and watching TV. After finishing my homework, I gradually felt bored and restless. I set out to find something fun to play, and in a moment an exciting idea emerged in my head. I told Bruce and Sandy: “I will have an adventure, would you guys like to join me?” In fact, they always joined my silly games and enjoyed them with me. Soon afterwards, we started to rearrange and move all the furniture from the living room to every bedroom; in other words, the furniture was completely out of place. The purpose of what we did was to make every piece of furniture connected altogether or be closed to each other as much as possible. After ten minutes of effort, everything was finally ready. I said: “Now, imagine we are monkeys in a devil forest, and the only way to survive is going through the path made up by furniture without touching the floor.” Well, I know that really sounds like a stupid idea to you now, but we were really amused by this sort of activities at that time.
We started off from the living room and went to each bedroom by jumping on chairs and tables or hanging on a wooden shelf. At the beginning everything was going well until we came to a big closet, two or three times higher than my height, in my room. We attempted to climb through the closet by grasping the ledge over it. At first I quickly and easily got through this barrier, but Bruce was a little nervous and shifted his body on the closet slowly and carefully. The closet abruptly got unstable and swayed, as soon as he passed the half of it. So Bruce hastily tried to stabilize that, but unfortunately it did not work. As a result, the closet fell down, and Bruce stuck beneath it. The accident truly astounded us, yet it was a mercy that he didn’t get hurt. After the failure of seeking to save my brother by removing the closet from his body, I worked myself up and ran out to find my mother for help. When I accessed the neighbor’s house, my mother was playing mahjong with our neighbors. She asked me what the matter was; I was a little shy to say: “We had an adventure at home, and consequently … Bruce was stuck on the closet in my room.” My mother was angry and shouted at me, “What have you done?” while other adults laughed. At that moment I felt so guilty and embarrassed; if there was a hole near me, undoubtedly I would leap and hid myself. Ten minutes afterward Bruce was saved by mom, and I was punished. But it did not stop me from planning another stupid game later.
Another one of my unforgettable embarrassing experience is that when I and my brother attempted to steal fruits from a fruit tree in somebody’s backyard, and an accident occurred. In our community there were several small wild fruit trees. Every summer, I, Bruce and kids in our neighborhood always checked in turn whether the fruit was ripe or not. Although the various wild fruits such as guavas, mangos, lemons, papayas, and longans, even watermelons and strawberries we found occasionally, were surely delicious, we enjoyed the picking activities and hanging out together at the sunny afternoon but ate these fruits. One day we found a big guava tree in someone’s backyard outside of our community. There were two walls, about one meter between them, separately at the border of the backyard and our community. We measured that if we climbed up the wall, it is not too difficult for us to jump cross the wall and get the guava. Thus, we felt rather excited, and it really fired up the vigor of us to conquer the challenge.
Although the wall was two or three times higher than our height, we could have climbed up readily by helping each other. After standing on the wall, we recognized that it was not truly easy to jump across the gap as we thought before. Nevertheless, we were still apt to try it. The older kids tried to leap at first and younger ones followed them. At the beginning everything was going well, we all successfully got through the barrier and staggered on the roof covered with old and fragile tiles. Unluckily, as I almost got the first guava, I mindlessly broke a tile and lost one of my shoes. The sound from the broken tile seemed to arouse the host’s attention, so we tended to jump back to our community in a hurry. At this moment, Bruce got nervous again and tried to stride on the roof for getting out of there. But the roof was far more vulnerable than we expected. Suddenly, boom, the part of the roof slumped down, Bruce plunged into the house. This time he was not as lucky before, he broke one of his arms. However, the fortune was that the host was a benevolent elder; he had mercy on us and sent Bruce to the hospital. After we came back home from the hospital with the host, my mother was mad at me and shouted: “Why couldn’t you just stop bringing about troubles?” Although the host not only didn’t request us to compensate for his house but said:”If you want to pick the guava in my backyard next time, just push the bell at the entrance and I would let you in,” I felt embarrassed and burst into tears, because I thought that it was totally my fault bringing troubles to the host, my mom and Bruce. I really regretted for what I did then.
Afterward, however, I still did lots of stupid things during my youth; it seemed that I did not get many lessons from aforementioned embarrassing experiences. But I gradually regarded those experiences as precious memories when I grew up, because they were innocent, clear, vivid, unforgettable, and, the most important, they were the story of my own life. There is a Chinese proverb: “Footprints in the sand show where one has been,” I think it is true. Even though embarrassing experiences may still make us feel a little awkward when the flashbacks are recalled occasionally, they are the best evidences to demonstrate that we ever enjoyed our childhood or youth.
One of my unforgettable embarrassing experiences happened in an afternoon when no adults were at home; my father work outside and my mom went to play mahjong with neighbors. I orchestrated a stupid adventure and led to some troubles in the end. To begin with, three children, I, Bruce and Sandy, my young brother and sister, stayed at home doing homework and watching TV. After finishing my homework, I gradually felt bored and restless. I set out to find something fun to play, and in a moment an exciting idea emerged in my head. I told Bruce and Sandy: “I will have an adventure, would you guys like to join me?” In fact, they always joined my silly games and enjoyed them with me. Soon afterwards, we started to rearrange and move all the furniture from the living room to every bedroom; in other words, the furniture was completely out of place. The purpose of what we did was to make every piece of furniture connected altogether or be closed to each other as much as possible. After ten minutes of effort, everything was finally ready. I said: “Now, imagine we are monkeys in a devil forest, and the only way to survive is going through the path made up by furniture without touching the floor.” Well, I know that really sounds like a stupid idea to you now, but we were really amused by this sort of activities at that time.
We started off from the living room and went to each bedroom by jumping on chairs and tables or hanging on a wooden shelf. At the beginning everything was going well until we came to a big closet, two or three times higher than my height, in my room. We attempted to climb through the closet by grasping the ledge over it. At first I quickly and easily got through this barrier, but Bruce was a little nervous and shifted his body on the closet slowly and carefully. The closet abruptly got unstable and swayed, as soon as he passed the half of it. So Bruce hastily tried to stabilize that, but unfortunately it did not work. As a result, the closet fell down, and Bruce stuck beneath it. The accident truly astounded us, yet it was a mercy that he didn’t get hurt. After the failure of seeking to save my brother by removing the closet from his body, I worked myself up and ran out to find my mother for help. When I accessed the neighbor’s house, my mother was playing mahjong with our neighbors. She asked me what the matter was; I was a little shy to say: “We had an adventure at home, and consequently … Bruce was stuck on the closet in my room.” My mother was angry and shouted at me, “What have you done?” while other adults laughed. At that moment I felt so guilty and embarrassed; if there was a hole near me, undoubtedly I would leap and hid myself. Ten minutes afterward Bruce was saved by mom, and I was punished. But it did not stop me from planning another stupid game later.
Another one of my unforgettable embarrassing experience is that when I and my brother attempted to steal fruits from a fruit tree in somebody’s backyard, and an accident occurred. In our community there were several small wild fruit trees. Every summer, I, Bruce and kids in our neighborhood always checked in turn whether the fruit was ripe or not. Although the various wild fruits such as guavas, mangos, lemons, papayas, and longans, even watermelons and strawberries we found occasionally, were surely delicious, we enjoyed the picking activities and hanging out together at the sunny afternoon but ate these fruits. One day we found a big guava tree in someone’s backyard outside of our community. There were two walls, about one meter between them, separately at the border of the backyard and our community. We measured that if we climbed up the wall, it is not too difficult for us to jump cross the wall and get the guava. Thus, we felt rather excited, and it really fired up the vigor of us to conquer the challenge.
Although the wall was two or three times higher than our height, we could have climbed up readily by helping each other. After standing on the wall, we recognized that it was not truly easy to jump across the gap as we thought before. Nevertheless, we were still apt to try it. The older kids tried to leap at first and younger ones followed them. At the beginning everything was going well, we all successfully got through the barrier and staggered on the roof covered with old and fragile tiles. Unluckily, as I almost got the first guava, I mindlessly broke a tile and lost one of my shoes. The sound from the broken tile seemed to arouse the host’s attention, so we tended to jump back to our community in a hurry. At this moment, Bruce got nervous again and tried to stride on the roof for getting out of there. But the roof was far more vulnerable than we expected. Suddenly, boom, the part of the roof slumped down, Bruce plunged into the house. This time he was not as lucky before, he broke one of his arms. However, the fortune was that the host was a benevolent elder; he had mercy on us and sent Bruce to the hospital. After we came back home from the hospital with the host, my mother was mad at me and shouted: “Why couldn’t you just stop bringing about troubles?” Although the host not only didn’t request us to compensate for his house but said:”If you want to pick the guava in my backyard next time, just push the bell at the entrance and I would let you in,” I felt embarrassed and burst into tears, because I thought that it was totally my fault bringing troubles to the host, my mom and Bruce. I really regretted for what I did then.
Afterward, however, I still did lots of stupid things during my youth; it seemed that I did not get many lessons from aforementioned embarrassing experiences. But I gradually regarded those experiences as precious memories when I grew up, because they were innocent, clear, vivid, unforgettable, and, the most important, they were the story of my own life. There is a Chinese proverb: “Footprints in the sand show where one has been,” I think it is true. Even though embarrassing experiences may still make us feel a little awkward when the flashbacks are recalled occasionally, they are the best evidences to demonstrate that we ever enjoyed our childhood or youth.
2009/04/24
Time Management Matrix
Many students complain that they don’t have enough time to join school organizations, to do a part-time job, to be in love, to work out regularly, or mingle with different friends according to their heavy academic work load. However, some students still can take those things done well and get good credits from various courses at the same time. In the past, I was like the aforementioned students and was really curious about how some people could accomplish many things simultaneously. Was it just because they were smarter than me? No, I never believed it. In order to find out the answer, I tried to contact various people and extracurricular activities including school clubs, part time jobs and study groups and, what is more, falling in love during sophomore year. Then, I truly had much fun and made a lot of friends from those activities, but in the mean time I got poor academic performance as a result. I felt so frustrated and thought I was undoubtedly a stupid guy until I learned some time management skills, such as keeping the schedule, writing down the to-do list, organizing the file system etc. Among these many skills, I have found that Time Management Matrix is the best way of arranging one’s time to do proper thing effectively.
Doing right thing adequately is much more important than doing wrong thing beautifully,” said Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University Professor famous for his “Last Lecture.” This means setting a personal goal is always the first thing to do. The reason is that setting a concrete goal will make you suddenly realize that time is so finite for you to accomplish all the things you have to or want to do. According to time limitation, you should find out which things are really worthy to do or urgent to do. There is a well-known rule called Pareto’s Principle (20/80 rules), it says “80 percents of work give 20 percents results; 20 percents of work give 80 percents results.” In other words, if you do the right things, you will work less but get more accomplishment. I learned Time Management Matrix (see Figure 1) from the book First Thing First, definitely can help you arrange tasks and goals systematically and concentrate on essential things. Time Management matrix focuses on two dimensions: the urgency and the importance of the tasks. As it turns out, the matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants so that the user can easily understand which things should have more priority than others or which things could be put aside until leisure time. Below are the details of each quadrant..
As you can see in Figure 1, Quadrant 1 represents urgent and important goals which are also called “firefighting”, because the activities in it are very important and need to be dealt with immediately. If there are many tasks in this quadrant, you will definitely work hard and feel stress. The best example for students is that there are always several term papers, exams or final projects due near the end of semester in this quadrant, and all of them obviously make students feel stressed.
In comparison with Quadrant 1, the activities in Quadrant 4 are neither urgent nor important, and are regarded as “time wasting.” These activities usually consume a lot of time, but do not move you toward your goals. Unfortunately, most of daily activities of many students are fallen into this quadrant, because they are generally easier to do and students have less stress with them. For example, playing computer games, watching soap operas or TV series, and reading comic books are all popular activities for students. Those activities, however, have no contribution to their goals, but will make them feel anxious. Because it is usually two or three hours passing unknowingly, yet they have not done any task.
It is not difficult for students to distinguish between the priorities of activities in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 4, but which one is the second priority after Quadrant 1 always makes students confuse. In fact, most students would like more to do the activities of Quadrant 3 than Quadrant 2. Quadrant 3 is “distraction.” The activities in it must be dealt with right now, but frankly they are not important. It is interesting that a lot of students consider Quadrant 3 should be done first. They think, “Ok, this is not important but urgent, so I have to work on it.” For instance, many students usually answer the phone call or MSN, or check out their e-mails frequently, when they are studying or doing homework. Though they may feel busy and self-fulfilled, the truth is not much progress to their goal. That is to say, the noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance.
Conversely, Quadrant 2 includes activities that are important but not urgent and called “Quality time.” As the matter of fact, what your attitude to this quadrant is the key factor that determines how you feel when facing a lot of tasks. The reason is that many Quadrant 1 activities could be reduced by allocating time in your diary to carry out the Quadrant 2 tasks at your best(In this respect Quadrant 2 may be even more important than Quadrant 1). To illustrate, if we keep surveying the related materials of the term paper or review the lecture notes every day, we will feel confident to face the term papers and exams at the end of semester while others die hard.
During the sophomore year, I always felt busy but I still could not do things well, because I spent a lot of time on Quadrant 3 & 4 activities, such as playing computer games, hitting the bar, chatting by MSN and fooling around with diehard followers. Although doing those activities really gave me fun, I always felt empty after the activities and slept not well. The Time Management Matrix helps me to readily arrange the limited time to do proper thing. When I consciously strive to maximize Quadrant 2 time, it really helps me to achieve some goals or dreams which I never thought I can fulfill so quickly, such as publishing my research on an international conference, conquering Mt. Jade and Mt. Xue, and even acquiring the ability of English writing! Though being a master student makes me busier than before, I can extract some time to do what I want to do and, more importantly, still have fun! If Time Management Matrix gives me so much time and fun, I am sure it can give you the same benefits.
Doing right thing adequately is much more important than doing wrong thing beautifully,” said Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon University Professor famous for his “Last Lecture.” This means setting a personal goal is always the first thing to do. The reason is that setting a concrete goal will make you suddenly realize that time is so finite for you to accomplish all the things you have to or want to do. According to time limitation, you should find out which things are really worthy to do or urgent to do. There is a well-known rule called Pareto’s Principle (20/80 rules), it says “80 percents of work give 20 percents results; 20 percents of work give 80 percents results.” In other words, if you do the right things, you will work less but get more accomplishment. I learned Time Management Matrix (see Figure 1) from the book First Thing First, definitely can help you arrange tasks and goals systematically and concentrate on essential things. Time Management matrix focuses on two dimensions: the urgency and the importance of the tasks. As it turns out, the matrix categorizes tasks into four quadrants so that the user can easily understand which things should have more priority than others or which things could be put aside until leisure time. Below are the details of each quadrant..
Figure 1. Time Management Matrix
In comparison with Quadrant 1, the activities in Quadrant 4 are neither urgent nor important, and are regarded as “time wasting.” These activities usually consume a lot of time, but do not move you toward your goals. Unfortunately, most of daily activities of many students are fallen into this quadrant, because they are generally easier to do and students have less stress with them. For example, playing computer games, watching soap operas or TV series, and reading comic books are all popular activities for students. Those activities, however, have no contribution to their goals, but will make them feel anxious. Because it is usually two or three hours passing unknowingly, yet they have not done any task.
It is not difficult for students to distinguish between the priorities of activities in Quadrant 1 and Quadrant 4, but which one is the second priority after Quadrant 1 always makes students confuse. In fact, most students would like more to do the activities of Quadrant 3 than Quadrant 2. Quadrant 3 is “distraction.” The activities in it must be dealt with right now, but frankly they are not important. It is interesting that a lot of students consider Quadrant 3 should be done first. They think, “Ok, this is not important but urgent, so I have to work on it.” For instance, many students usually answer the phone call or MSN, or check out their e-mails frequently, when they are studying or doing homework. Though they may feel busy and self-fulfilled, the truth is not much progress to their goal. That is to say, the noise of urgency creates the illusion of importance.
Conversely, Quadrant 2 includes activities that are important but not urgent and called “Quality time.” As the matter of fact, what your attitude to this quadrant is the key factor that determines how you feel when facing a lot of tasks. The reason is that many Quadrant 1 activities could be reduced by allocating time in your diary to carry out the Quadrant 2 tasks at your best(In this respect Quadrant 2 may be even more important than Quadrant 1). To illustrate, if we keep surveying the related materials of the term paper or review the lecture notes every day, we will feel confident to face the term papers and exams at the end of semester while others die hard.
During the sophomore year, I always felt busy but I still could not do things well, because I spent a lot of time on Quadrant 3 & 4 activities, such as playing computer games, hitting the bar, chatting by MSN and fooling around with diehard followers. Although doing those activities really gave me fun, I always felt empty after the activities and slept not well. The Time Management Matrix helps me to readily arrange the limited time to do proper thing. When I consciously strive to maximize Quadrant 2 time, it really helps me to achieve some goals or dreams which I never thought I can fulfill so quickly, such as publishing my research on an international conference, conquering Mt. Jade and Mt. Xue, and even acquiring the ability of English writing! Though being a master student makes me busier than before, I can extract some time to do what I want to do and, more importantly, still have fun! If Time Management Matrix gives me so much time and fun, I am sure it can give you the same benefits.
2009/03/19
Book Review: A New Earth -- Awakening to Your Life's Purpose
A New Earth – Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose, published in 2005, is the follow-up to the 2,000,000 copy bestselling inspirational book, The Power of Now. “Being able to share this material with you is a gift and a part of the fulfillment of my life's purpose. It was an awakening for me that I want for you, too” said Oprah Winfrey, the talk show queen, on her book club selection in January of 2008. After that the book grown immediately popular and it has been printed more than 4.7 million copies in the world. Eckhart Tolle, the author of this book, graduated from the University of London, is a spiritual teacher and writer. Although he was deeply influenced by Buddhism, Christianity and Hinduism, his book focused on spirituality rather than on any particular religious denomination; besides that, he came up with a whole new living philosophy by blending and refining them. The central idea of this book is try to tell people that don’t be trapped in self-created worlds of thought, the voices of ego, and the key way to escape from human suffering is to focus one’s attention on the present moment. The idea is much the same with The Power of Now, but A New Earth gives more detailed examination of it.
In the beginning of the book, the author claims that our ego-based state of consciousness not only takes away one’s personal happiness but also produces conflicts and suffering throughout the world. If people cannot shift in consciousness, we will always create the same world which pains us. On the contrary, the whole new world will emerge only when people live in the awakened state.
Then Tolle explain what is the principal barrier to the awakened state: ego. Ego is the illusion of "I" by mistakenly indentifying with the world of form, such as gender, body, race, nationality, region, occupation, accumulated possession, social role, etc. In other words, ego is what you think who you are, the identification of you, and it always makes you need more possession to strengthen the identification in order to survive. The ego does not know the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside. The dreadful thing is that ego is never satisfied with what you have because it always needs more than whatever you gain. The ego exists in the thought of form and always compulsively creates a plenty of repetitious nonsense voice in the head. Furthermore, the voice pretends to be you, unobserved emotions also react to it, and it could create the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness to make people suffer when ego feels great deficiency. Christianity calls this kind of human dysfunction Original Sin; Hinduism calls it Maya; Buddhism calls it Dukkha.
Even though the normal state of humankind causes suffering, it is possible for us to radically transform our consciousness and escape from the ongoing prison – living in the present moment. Tolle believes that human intellect does not have any solution of the suffering of humankind, because the thinking is also a tiny aspect of consciousness. He then informs us that the only way to diminish ego or to transcend ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. “Whenever you notice the voice of ego, you will realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it… In the background there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind,” says Tolle in his book. However, the awareness can only emerge by the way of focusing your attention on the present. The presence can help people destroy the time-bound state of consciousness; therefore, they will not feel pain anymore by something that has happened but should not have or by something that has not happened but should have. The world we living always changes constantly and anything happening is unstable. Thus, only when we face facts, experience the present moment, and do not resist the situations we encounter every day, we become empowered because we are alignment with universal purpose. Finally, after you finish shifting the consciousness from the ego-based state to the presence state, happiness will come from inside and a whole new world will appear in front of you.
This book really touches and inspires me, because I was sort of person who always feel anxiety, stress, self-abased and paranoid. The failure in the past and the wanting in the future were the things I was usually concerned about, and that always made me unhappy. I also always thought that I was not good enough and never satisfied even when actually getting some improvement. After reading this book, I try to practice doing something to help me focus my attention to the present moment, for example, doing meditation and reading the Diamond Sutra. It is really amazing! There is a magical power which totally changes me. I will not feel so frustrated when I encounter failure and will not be arrogant when I do something good, if I try to focus on now. Moreover, I do not suffer from insomnia anymore and enthusiastically meet everyday life in the morning. I experience the whole new world. So I strongly recommend those persons who always think that they mess up their life should really take a look at this book. Also, it is absolutely worth taking time to read this book for anyone who would like to awaken the life’s purpose.
2009/6/18 下面是我在e-mail中，向朋友推薦這本書，
這本書簡而言之，幾個重點大概就是..
1.把握當下(因為過去與未來都是小我產生的虛相)
2.感受小我產生的無意識 (其實就是東方人說的"念頭")
3.一旦得以感受到小我不斷湧現的念頭, 就有機會不被其掌控
4.當能夠不被小我掌控, 本質就會再現
5.本質再現, 眼前的事物便不再受小我所詮譯, 於是不再有抗拒,
而是接受與順應眼前的一切, 與之融合一體..
6.新世界就出現了..
其它旁支大多是用來佐證或舉例,
但最有趣的是作者用了佛家或老莊的思想重新詮譯了一些聖經上的文
這本書有點難讀,
可能要接觸過一點心理學與佛學比較能夠掌握那些作者定義的名詞.
而且那些名詞再經過翻譯後, 就更難懂了...
所以我猜看這本書時, 先不要太執著於名詞的定義, 讀起來會比較流暢...
下面是兩本推薦書..
美麗人生練習本 - 通往成功的100堂課
這本書以非常簡單明瞭的方式, 告訴人們什麼是"小我"
金剛經說什麼
我第一次聽到這本書是專科五年級的時候,
那時候補習班的國文老師說年輕人應該看一下這本書,
可以開智慧, 當時我只是抄在筆記本上..
上大學後, 有一次去看中醫,
那個中醫跟我閒聊, 也推薦我一定要看一下這本書..
我就到網路上下載, 但是沒有看..直到去年才開始慢慢一點點的看...
雖然還有三分之一沒看完..但是它跟 "一個新世界 "一樣,
都是抓著一個中心不斷的從各角度闡釋與舉例..
只是金剛經的哲學層次再多一些...
但目的都是一樣的, 都是找到本質, 找到佛.
佛這個字對東方人來說太過嚴肅了,
常常被其外在的形象所誤解,
它其實並沒有那麼遙遠且神奇, 它就是本質,
它不是名詞, 而是一個形容詞, 形容一個難以用言語形容的XXX...
很多人喜歡把XXX代換成境界, 但是一旦有了境界,
小我就出現了, 它不是佛...
"一個新世界"的作者用 "內在空間"來代換XXX,
蠻貼切的一個詞; 金剛經則是用"空"來闡釋..
但是他們都只是一個法門, 一個方向..
所以佛教的哲學從不排斥任何其它的宗教,
因為找到XXX並不只有一條路,
每個人都有自己找到它的方式..
而每個宗教都是不同的先知留下的不同法門,
他們提供人們一個可能追尋的方向...
他們就像指向月亮的手指,
是告訴人們可以走什麼方向,
但不是要人們看著那隻手指...
如此那些法門及宗教就不再那麼嚴肅了,
而可以用哲學的角度來欣賞它們.
還有千萬別過於執著佛,空, 內在空間.....等定義,
因為它們都是形容詞, 是要靠體驗的,
一旦過於執著文字上的定義, 就找不著它了..
這也是為什麼佛教徒說佛是不可思議的...
最後, 若有機會接觸靜坐的話, 建議可以嘗試看看,
它是一個看見內在小我的好方法..
2009/10/27
下面的講者是一個哈佛的腦神經科學家，自己親身經歷了一次中風，然後得到了一個全新的體驗。
她的演講充分揮灑了左右腦的能力，一下可以拿出真實的大腦，很理性邏輯的描述它，
一下又可以像"迷霧驚魂"裡那個瘋婆子，不斷的講一些虛無飄渺的境界，簡直判若兩人。
當她開始談到內在的聲音、身體眾多細胞散出來的能量、身體分子與外界分子界線消失等，
真的很難不讓我想到"A New Earth"和"金鋼經說什麼"這兩本書，
而這兩本書的思維是多麼的接近佛道思想，
我很好奇人神分離的基督徒國家，如何開始能接受人就是神，神就是人這種想法。
In the beginning of the book, the author claims that our ego-based state of consciousness not only takes away one’s personal happiness but also produces conflicts and suffering throughout the world. If people cannot shift in consciousness, we will always create the same world which pains us. On the contrary, the whole new world will emerge only when people live in the awakened state.
Then Tolle explain what is the principal barrier to the awakened state: ego. Ego is the illusion of "I" by mistakenly indentifying with the world of form, such as gender, body, race, nationality, region, occupation, accumulated possession, social role, etc. In other words, ego is what you think who you are, the identification of you, and it always makes you need more possession to strengthen the identification in order to survive. The ego does not know the source of all energy is within you, so it seeks it outside. The dreadful thing is that ego is never satisfied with what you have because it always needs more than whatever you gain. The ego exists in the thought of form and always compulsively creates a plenty of repetitious nonsense voice in the head. Furthermore, the voice pretends to be you, unobserved emotions also react to it, and it could create the dysfunction that leads to anger, jealousy, and unhappiness to make people suffer when ego feels great deficiency. Christianity calls this kind of human dysfunction Original Sin; Hinduism calls it Maya; Buddhism calls it Dukkha.
Even though the normal state of humankind causes suffering, it is possible for us to radically transform our consciousness and escape from the ongoing prison – living in the present moment. Tolle believes that human intellect does not have any solution of the suffering of humankind, because the thinking is also a tiny aspect of consciousness. He then informs us that the only way to diminish ego or to transcend ego is to be aware of it, since awareness and ego are incompatible. “Whenever you notice the voice of ego, you will realize that you are not the voice, but the one who is aware of it… In the background there is the awareness. In the foreground, there is the voice, the thinker. In this way you are becoming free of the ego, free of the unobserved mind,” says Tolle in his book. However, the awareness can only emerge by the way of focusing your attention on the present. The presence can help people destroy the time-bound state of consciousness; therefore, they will not feel pain anymore by something that has happened but should not have or by something that has not happened but should have. The world we living always changes constantly and anything happening is unstable. Thus, only when we face facts, experience the present moment, and do not resist the situations we encounter every day, we become empowered because we are alignment with universal purpose. Finally, after you finish shifting the consciousness from the ego-based state to the presence state, happiness will come from inside and a whole new world will appear in front of you.
This book really touches and inspires me, because I was sort of person who always feel anxiety, stress, self-abased and paranoid. The failure in the past and the wanting in the future were the things I was usually concerned about, and that always made me unhappy. I also always thought that I was not good enough and never satisfied even when actually getting some improvement. After reading this book, I try to practice doing something to help me focus my attention to the present moment, for example, doing meditation and reading the Diamond Sutra. It is really amazing! There is a magical power which totally changes me. I will not feel so frustrated when I encounter failure and will not be arrogant when I do something good, if I try to focus on now. Moreover, I do not suffer from insomnia anymore and enthusiastically meet everyday life in the morning. I experience the whole new world. So I strongly recommend those persons who always think that they mess up their life should really take a look at this book. Also, it is absolutely worth taking time to read this book for anyone who would like to awaken the life’s purpose.
2009/6/18 下面是我在e-mail中，向朋友推薦這本書，
這本書簡而言之，幾個重點大概就是..
1.把握當下(因為過去與未來都是小我產生的虛相)
2.感受小我產生的無意識 (其實就是東方人說的"念頭")
3.一旦得以感受到小我不斷湧現的念頭, 就有機會不被其掌控
4.當能夠不被小我掌控, 本質就會再現
5.本質再現, 眼前的事物便不再受小我所詮譯, 於是不再有抗拒,
而是接受與順應眼前的一切, 與之融合一體..
6.新世界就出現了..
其它旁支大多是用來佐證或舉例,
但最有趣的是作者用了佛家或老莊的思想重新詮譯了一些聖經上的文
這本書有點難讀,
可能要接觸過一點心理學與佛學比較能夠掌握那些作者定義的名詞.
而且那些名詞再經過翻譯後, 就更難懂了...
所以我猜看這本書時, 先不要太執著於名詞的定義, 讀起來會比較流暢...
下面是兩本推薦書..
美麗人生練習本 - 通往成功的100堂課
這本書以非常簡單明瞭的方式, 告訴人們什麼是"小我"
金剛經說什麼
我第一次聽到這本書是專科五年級的時候,
那時候補習班的國文老師說年輕人應該看一下這本書,
可以開智慧, 當時我只是抄在筆記本上..
上大學後, 有一次去看中醫,
那個中醫跟我閒聊, 也推薦我一定要看一下這本書..
我就到網路上下載, 但是沒有看..直到去年才開始慢慢一點點的看...
雖然還有三分之一沒看完..但是它跟 "一個新世界 "一樣,
都是抓著一個中心不斷的從各角度闡釋與舉例..
只是金剛經的哲學層次再多一些...
但目的都是一樣的, 都是找到本質, 找到佛.
佛這個字對東方人來說太過嚴肅了,
常常被其外在的形象所誤解,
它其實並沒有那麼遙遠且神奇, 它就是本質,
它不是名詞, 而是一個形容詞, 形容一個難以用言語形容的XXX...
很多人喜歡把XXX代換成境界, 但是一旦有了境界,
小我就出現了, 它不是佛...
"一個新世界"的作者用 "內在空間"來代換XXX,
蠻貼切的一個詞; 金剛經則是用"空"來闡釋..
但是他們都只是一個法門, 一個方向..
所以佛教的哲學從不排斥任何其它的宗教,
因為找到XXX並不只有一條路,
每個人都有自己找到它的方式..
而每個宗教都是不同的先知留下的不同法門,
他們提供人們一個可能追尋的方向...
他們就像指向月亮的手指,
是告訴人們可以走什麼方向,
但不是要人們看著那隻手指...
如此那些法門及宗教就不再那麼嚴肅了,
而可以用哲學的角度來欣賞它們.
還有千萬別過於執著佛,空, 內在空間.....等定義,
因為它們都是形容詞, 是要靠體驗的,
一旦過於執著文字上的定義, 就找不著它了..
這也是為什麼佛教徒說佛是不可思議的...
最後, 若有機會接觸靜坐的話, 建議可以嘗試看看,
它是一個看見內在小我的好方法..
2009/10/27
下面的講者是一個哈佛的腦神經科學家，自己親身經歷了一次中風，然後得到了一個全新的體驗。
她的演講充分揮灑了左右腦的能力，一下可以拿出真實的大腦，很理性邏輯的描述它，
一下又可以像"迷霧驚魂"裡那個瘋婆子，不斷的講一些虛無飄渺的境界，簡直判若兩人。
當她開始談到內在的聲音、身體眾多細胞散出來的能量、身體分子與外界分子界線消失等，
真的很難不讓我想到"A New Earth"和"金鋼經說什麼"這兩本書，
而這兩本書的思維是多麼的接近佛道思想，
我很好奇人神分離的基督徒國家，如何開始能接受人就是神，神就是人這種想法。
2009/01/01
The Profile of My Advisor
Since having been a junior at college, I was lucky to have had a great and awesome advisor, Tsai-Yen Li, for directing my academic research project until getting my master degree. My advisor received his M.S. in computer science and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Stanford University. After earning his doctorate, he worked at a well-known technology company in America for a while and moved from industry to academia in order to contribute his best knowledge to students in Taiwan. He has a lot of research publications including robotics, computer animation, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and other fantastic research issues.
His dazzling academic background, cool research topics, lovely personality, and good teaching make him the most popular advisor in our department. In my heart, he is the most rational, objective, humble, intelligent, and diligent person I have ever met. Two years ago, he was a director of computer center then and proceeded three or four big projects simultaneously, including National Science Council projects and school-to-work programs. Even though he was really busy all the time, he still tried to make time, as much as he could do, to meet with each of twenty students, including juniors, seniors, and graduate students, once per week. Besides, he always picked up his children from school on time for having dinner together with his wife every day. After leaving the position of director of the computer center, he has taken over the chair of our department. I guess that not only because he is a genius but also because he tries to plan anything well and make good use of every inch of time; otherwise, he could not always be able to get many things done.
What is more, he is also a very supportive academic advisor. Although so insightful, he never tells students what is right and what is wrong or forces students to do something good. Setting himself as an example for the students is the way he teaches, and I like this style very much. By the way, I have never heard any student who could irritate him or comment on him negatively, because he never makes a subjective judgment or blame on a student. Even though he is a perfect man, he never takes pride in himself but in his students. Someone says an advisor plays sort of a quasi-parental role of a graduate student, I think that is really true and I feel happy to have such a nice advisor.
P.S.
My English teacher suggeted me send my advisor this article as a gift, but I guess doing my best on my research will be better.
His dazzling academic background, cool research topics, lovely personality, and good teaching make him the most popular advisor in our department. In my heart, he is the most rational, objective, humble, intelligent, and diligent person I have ever met. Two years ago, he was a director of computer center then and proceeded three or four big projects simultaneously, including National Science Council projects and school-to-work programs. Even though he was really busy all the time, he still tried to make time, as much as he could do, to meet with each of twenty students, including juniors, seniors, and graduate students, once per week. Besides, he always picked up his children from school on time for having dinner together with his wife every day. After leaving the position of director of the computer center, he has taken over the chair of our department. I guess that not only because he is a genius but also because he tries to plan anything well and make good use of every inch of time; otherwise, he could not always be able to get many things done.
What is more, he is also a very supportive academic advisor. Although so insightful, he never tells students what is right and what is wrong or forces students to do something good. Setting himself as an example for the students is the way he teaches, and I like this style very much. By the way, I have never heard any student who could irritate him or comment on him negatively, because he never makes a subjective judgment or blame on a student. Even though he is a perfect man, he never takes pride in himself but in his students. Someone says an advisor plays sort of a quasi-parental role of a graduate student, I think that is really true and I feel happy to have such a nice advisor.
P.S.
My English teacher suggeted me send my advisor this article as a gift, but I guess doing my best on my research will be better.
2008/11/26
The Most Important Turning Point in My Life
For me, the worst experience until now is being a fledgling solider, but it is also the most important turning point in my life. While recalling the period of my absurd youth life before joining the army, being a junior five-year college student, I really think I idled away most of my past time and screwed up everything. In those days, I hung out with my friends for doing all stupid, pointless and time-wasting activities all the time. I almost never thought about the objectives of my life, let alone doing some preparations for my next step in future. After graduating from the college, I tried to attend the transfer examination; undoubtedly, I failed that and had no other alternatives but to join the army for serving the obligation to my country. To be honest, I was not ready for doing my mandatory military service then, but my father told me, “Don’t worry about it. Joining army will make you mature and be a man! ”
In the beginning of my army days, all my feeling was nervous, anxious or irritable all the day. There was a well-known convention in the army – a fledgling soldier had better obey older soldier’s unreasonable and unfair request; in other words, the fledgling soldier should do anything particularly harsh, dirty and troublesome which older soldiers would never want to do. Therefore, when I was a fledgling soldier, the first thing I needed to do as I got up in the morning everyday was to clean the lavatory, which always filled with a stinky odor and which made me feel like vomiting. During the day, I had a lot of work to do because I not only needed to accomplish the officer’s instructions but also shared older soldiers’ responsibility. Some of them never treated me well or appreciated me but always humiliated and blamed me. Besides, when something needed be done occasionally, I always had to pretend that I would like to take it over voluntarily, or older soldiers would force me to do that and after that they would give me more troubles before bed time. The most unfortunate is that there was no other fledgling soldier but me for half a year!
During that period, all those awful bad things on me not only really made me feel frustrated, self-abased and painful, but also made me think of something every night – something about my future. Not until those days did I realized how horrible my ridiculous life was in the past. From that moment on, I made a decision and kept it in mind– I don’t want to be a useless person anymore! After finishing my army days, I attended a cram school and studied really hard every day and night. Finally, I passed the transfer examination and got admission to NXXU.Although I was a little bit older to enroll in the university, I changed my life.
For me, being a fledgling soldier is the worst experience until now, but also certainly the most important turning point in my life. Even though most of my friends consider that doing the mandatory military service is a time wasting nightmare, I think that instead of wasting my time I really learned how to seize the day and prevent time from fleeing. Nowadays I am not totally in the dark anymore when I think of my future, and I manage my time better for getting things done. That is just like I made a nightmare, but after waking up I have got a new life!
In the beginning of my army days, all my feeling was nervous, anxious or irritable all the day. There was a well-known convention in the army – a fledgling soldier had better obey older soldier’s unreasonable and unfair request; in other words, the fledgling soldier should do anything particularly harsh, dirty and troublesome which older soldiers would never want to do. Therefore, when I was a fledgling soldier, the first thing I needed to do as I got up in the morning everyday was to clean the lavatory, which always filled with a stinky odor and which made me feel like vomiting. During the day, I had a lot of work to do because I not only needed to accomplish the officer’s instructions but also shared older soldiers’ responsibility. Some of them never treated me well or appreciated me but always humiliated and blamed me. Besides, when something needed be done occasionally, I always had to pretend that I would like to take it over voluntarily, or older soldiers would force me to do that and after that they would give me more troubles before bed time. The most unfortunate is that there was no other fledgling soldier but me for half a year!
During that period, all those awful bad things on me not only really made me feel frustrated, self-abased and painful, but also made me think of something every night – something about my future. Not until those days did I realized how horrible my ridiculous life was in the past. From that moment on, I made a decision and kept it in mind– I don’t want to be a useless person anymore! After finishing my army days, I attended a cram school and studied really hard every day and night. Finally, I passed the transfer examination and got admission to NXXU.Although I was a little bit older to enroll in the university, I changed my life.
For me, being a fledgling soldier is the worst experience until now, but also certainly the most important turning point in my life. Even though most of my friends consider that doing the mandatory military service is a time wasting nightmare, I think that instead of wasting my time I really learned how to seize the day and prevent time from fleeing. Nowadays I am not totally in the dark anymore when I think of my future, and I manage my time better for getting things done. That is just like I made a nightmare, but after waking up I have got a new life!
2008/11/03
Best Clip in "The Family Man"
「The Family Man」 is one of my favorite movies, and I think the clip below is the best part of it. The song 「
2008/04/13
I wanna quit coffee!
As a undergraduate, I was always sleep slept at the midnight, though I has had a lot of course an early class in the next morning.
In order to make me better listening in class and more open eyes to see the board have a clear brain and not to fall asleep in the early class, I need used to have a cup of coffee before attending the first class every day.
Four years past later, I graduately gradually became to a coffee addict!!
Once I forget to get a cup of coffee in the morning, I'll feel sleepy in for the rest of the day.
Even though I slept very well for seven to eight hours last night, I still feel drowsy during the day, like as if I need a nap.
I can’t ignore the energy boost that comes from caffeine. But However, I do notice the negative side effects when after I drink coffee.
Caffeine seems to make a mess of mess up my thougth thought process and reduce my ability to focus just right on the task in front of me I am engaged in.
Additionally, caffeine sometimes make makes my heart beat faster so that I can't concentrate in the class, that . That realy troubles me too.
According to the symptoms described above, I don’t think it’s a good idea to remain addicted to coffee throughout the year. But first Hence, I should find another a substitute for coffee rather than go cold turkey. Somebody suggests to It is suggested that I replace the coffee with green tea so that I still get the caffeine from tea to boost my energy, but not as much with a less degree.
I'll try and to break this habit to make me free from coffeine boost side effects.
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I would really appreciate it if you could help me to improve my article.
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